


Pomona

by Gray_Days



Category: Homestuck, Problem Sleuth (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 11:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/686453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Prospit, you were called the Peerless Semiont.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pomona

Yeah, you've been brought low by a dame before. On Prospit you were the queen's Chief Arbiter, her Peerless Semiont. The solicitations for your diplomatic knowhow were numerous; compensation, somewhere approaching the realm of boundless. At countless royal functions and state meetings you were constantly at her majesty's side, her right hand, her bureaucrat in the wings, ready to offer advice or divert the flow of conversation from problematic subjects to promising ones.

Well, no. Actually, as it turns out, a kingdom that has been locked in a deadly stalemate since the moment of its existence is not rife with opportunities for diplomatic sparring. What this meant was that you spent most of your time at your desk, filling out endless sheaves of paperwork. A Peerless Semiont you may have been named, but in function you were little more than a Pleonastic Scribe.

Until the war started in earnest, and the heroes awoke in their towers, and everything became a frantic whirlwind of vague, worrying snippets of news and ineffectual back-and-forth while everyone you knew seemed to be shipped off to the battlefield in great golden ships and replaced with unfamiliar faces who were gone again the next day. You darted around on the fringes of the Queen's herd of advisors, ears desperately open for a decent picture of what was going on, the state of the war's headlong acceleration.

And then came the day when even those dignitaries were gone, the vaulted rooms of the palace surreally empty without the thronged rivers of white-shelled bureacratic cogs filling the halls, and you came into the throne room to find the Queen strapping a gleaming white regisword to her waist in preparation for going down to the battlefield herself.

You protested. She shut you down with a single word. You asked her, then, to let you help if nothing else. She acquiesced, and directed you to one of the last ships in the great ports of Prospit's moon, filled to a tenth of its actual capacity with the last stragglers of those heading to Skaia's surface.

Except she had tricked you, your queen, and in a last futile gesture of queenly noblesse oblige had sent you and your companions to an Exile ship headed for the ravaged surface of a dead planet.

 

Now you are a Problem Sleuth, one of many in the city. The solicitations for your service are moderate in quantity; compensation, at times, adequate. The stock of your gun is cold against your palm. You consider it to be your only friend in this world.

The faint ghost of a scent of steak dinners haunts these halls, Schrödingerian in its incumbency spurning the causal terms of past and future, never to collapse from its crepitating waveforms into physical manifestation. A wind gusts the void between the tall, dark buildings of the city, distinguishable from the one in which you work only by your notable absence within them. As a sign bearing the initials "P.S." flutters unregarded to the floor, the gusting wind seems to echo its fall in a sigh that would register at a precise pitch, though unrecognised, on any tuning instrument. It is the note Desolation plays.

It's going to be a long night.


End file.
